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408 National Tour Foundation
and the Washington Weekly Newsletters. The NRA is
known for it annual `Restaurant Show' held is
Chicago. Its first convention in Kansas City, when
the association was formed, brought about 68
attendees from 17 states. Today the convention is
one of the largest in the world, attracting more
than 100,000 participants from many countries,
with more than 19,000 exhibitors displaying their
products and services. The show, designed for all
levels of hospitality management, also features a
wide range of educational programmes, management
clinics and presentations. The Education
Foundation of the NRA is a non-profit organisation
whose mission is to enhance the professionalism
of the food service sector through education and
training. It organises a wide array of training
seminars designed to keep foodservice operators
educated and current. It administers the largest
career assistance programmes of its kind in this
field. Scholarships include undergraduate, professional
management development programme,
teacher work±study grants, graduate fellowships
and industry assistance grants. The headquarters of
the association is located in Chicago, Illinois.
MAHMOOD KHAN, USA
National Tour Foundation
Chartered in 1982, the National Tour Foundation
�NTF) was created to promote tour operator
travel services in North America. Its mission is to
enhance quality of education programmes and
processes in providing travel services, to improve the
quality, scope and use of research and information
for planning, developing and marketing tourism
products, and to create awareness of tourism's
value. Its headquarters is located in Lexington,
Kentucky, USA.
MARIA FUENMAYOR, USA
national tourism administration
The core function of an NTA is to provide central
government with poicy advice relating to tourism.
Alternatively it may exist as a small policy unit within
a larger ministry or department. Elsewhere, policymaking
may be undertaken by a larger multifunctional
national tourism organisation
�NTO). In such a case, the terms NTA and NTO
are often used synonymously.
Further reading
Elliot, J. �1997) Tourism:Politics and Public Sector
Management, Routledge, London.
Pearce, D.G. �1992) Tourism Organisations, Longman,
Harlow.
nationalism
DOUGLAS G. PEARCE, NEW ZEALAND
The term `nation' is normally used to refer to a
given set of people thought �by themselves and/or
others) to be bound together by the sharing of such
common and distinctive characteristics as territory,
language, religion, cultural traditions, history and
somatic features. Nationalism refers to the sense of
belonging to the same nation.
Unlike their nineteenth-century forebears, who
regarded nations as part of the natural order of
things, more recent scholars have stressed the fact
that nations are made rather than born. For Gellner
�1983), both nations and nationalism arose as a
direct consequence of the conjuncture of capitalism,
printing and the need in the modern world for a
coherent unit of communication and administration.
In similar vein, both Hobsbawm and Ranger
�1983) and Anderson �1983) have regarded the
nation as an imagined or invented community, and
nationalism as the vehicle �linguistic, cultural,
literary, mythological) to express that imagination;
both nations and nationalisms emerging from
specific political and economic circumstances.
It is, precisely, by way of the images and
imaginings spawned by the tourist industry that
nations and nationalism enter tourism studies,
specifically through their association with the idea
of `heritage'. This is a term which has been adopted,
if not appropriated, by tourism planners and
managers to describe some tourist sites as embodiments
of supposedly `essential' or `basic' national
characteristics. Thus, for example, parts of the English
tourist circuit are made up of such monuments to
nostalgic British nationalism as Buckingham Palace,
the Tower of London and Oxbridge colleges. Other
parts of the UK tourist itinerary are attended by
complimentary sorts of imagery such as souvenir